USA Dot Com is a blog covering politics and government from a conservative Christian perspective. Verne Strickland is a 50-year veteran of investigative journalism. This blog offers a take-no-prisoners style with a modicum of biting satire. Verne and his wife of 55 years, Durrene, live in Wilmington, NC.

By Julian March StarNewsOnline. 1/13/2015An activist who rose to national prominence in the late 1960s is slated to speak in Wilmington as part of the annual Martin Luther King Jr. CelebrationThe speaker is Angela Davis, who works to combat all forms of oppression as a teacher and activist, according to her biography at the University of California Santa Cruz, where she is a professor amerita. The free event is slated for Tuesday, Jan. 20, at Kenan Auditorium at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.All tickets are already taken, said Todd McFadden, a UNCW instructor and director of the Upperman African American Cultural Center.In 1969, Davis was fired from the University of California, Los Angeles, after she acknowledged being a member of the Communist Party, states an article in the New York Times. In 1970 she was connected with a notorious crime in California in which armed convicts escaped from a courtroom with hostages. Several people were killed in the escape, including a judge. The guns used in the incident were registered to Davis, who was later charged with murder, kidnapping and criminal conspiracy, according to the Times. A jury found Davis not guilty in 1972.McFadden said the controversy associated with Davis' name has faded since then. "Martin Luther King was controversial in his day but obviously is a much more accepted figure," he said. "Things like that change."Davis has lectured in all 50 states and is the author of nine books, so it is said.It is also alleged that she is especially concerned with the general tendency to devote more resources and attention to the prison system than to educational institutions."Having helped to popularize the notion the notion of a 'prison institutional complex,' she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement." For more information about the talk, call the Kenan Auditorium box office at 910-962-3500.Verne Strickland's Grading CommentsThe event is free -- way over-pricedDavis was fired from University of California An admitted member of Communist PartyMay have beat her rap -- but still a shady chickHelped armed convicts escape from courtroomThe gentlemen were charged with murder, kidnapping and stuffSeveral innocent people, including a judge, were killedGuns used in the crime were registered to DavisShe was charged with murder, kidnapping, conspiracyA confused jury found Davis not guilty UNCW's McFadden says controversy "has faded since then"(I, for one, don't think that's true or relevant)Davis wants people to "think seriously" about a future without prison -- a 21st century abolitionist movement. How crazy is that?She should have been put in the slammer decades ago, and should still be there. One reason she's not is the sanitized and glamorized aura that has surrounded her Hollywood crime novel plot life and general notoriety. Communist? Helped spring armed convicts? Resulting charges of murder and kidnapping, conspiracy? Yikes. She was a Bonnie and Clyde type figure with no Clyde. So it is thought that she will have something relevant to say to UNCW students and other lovers of gore and sensational crimes? What's wrong with this picture?

via Verne Strickland USA DOT COM 1/12/15

White House: 'It's fair to say' we were wrong on Paris unity rally

The White House erred in not sending a higher profile representative to this weekend's solidarity march in France following a terrorist attack on a satirical newspaper, press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday.

"It's fair to say we should have sent someone with a higher profile to be there," Earnest told reporters at the White House.

"Had the circumstances been a little bit different, I think the president himself would have liked to be there," Earnest added.

The White House said planning for the march had begun only 36 hours before the event, and that the security required for the president to visit would have been "onerous and significant."

Still, Earnest said, there should be no doubt that the administration and the American people stood in solidarity with France, nor that the United States was "committed to a strong relationship. The United States is with France and committed to the same kind of values they are."

The White House would not discuss whether it considered sending the president at any point.

Earnest said he did not know why Attorney General Eric Holder, who was in Paris earlier Sunday for a series of high-level counterterrorism meetings, was unable to stay to attend the march. He also said he did not know what the president, who remained at the White House throughout the day, did with his time.

The administration has come under fire from media commentators and Republican lawmakers for not sending a top administration officials to join the march, in which more than 40 heads of state participated.

"Especially at a time of such great pain, people will take cues from something like that," said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in an interview with CBS News.

"You recall what it felt like after 9/11 to have all these nations around the world rally to our side and take up our cause after we suffered so greatly," Rubio said. "The French are going through a similar trauma."

Earnest, asked if that criticism was fair, said that it was "certainly a free country and people have the opportunity to subject their elected officials to criticism and make it clear when they disagree with an action… taken by the administration."

Earlier Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry said he planned to visit France later in this week.

"I don't think the people of France have any doubt about America's understanding of what happened, about our personal sense of loss, and our deep commitment to the people of France in this moment of trial," Kerry said.

Sunday, January 11, 2015

Eleven years and billions of dollars later, American troops are once again in Iraq, after having withdrawn in 2011. This time, they better plan on staying for the long haul.

BY GOPAL RATNAMGopal Ratnam is a senior staff writer at Foreign Policy, covering the White House, the Pentagon and broader national security issues. A native of India,Gopal has covered topics ranging from child-labor law violations and the automotive industry to the international arms trade, the politics of weapons purchases, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has reported from dozens of countries, including Iraq and Afghanistan. Most recently he was the Pentagon reporter for Bloomberg News.

When American troops were about to invade Iraq in 2003 to dislodge Saddam Hussein from power, then-Maj. Gen. David Petraeus told a reporter: “Tell me how this ends.” Eleven years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, thousands of U.S. troops are once again in Iraq fighting a different foe. But the same question still resonates.

President Barack Obama’s withdrawal of American forces in 2011 after failing to win a security agreement with Iraq has already been undone by Obama ordering as many as 3,100 troops to help train the Iraqi military to take on the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. But even if U.S. and Iraqi forces defeat the militant group, preventing a disintegration of Iraq along sectarian and religious lines may require a long-term presence of U.S. forces, former American officials and defense analysts say.

“You cannot get the goal you want of a stable Iraq and a permanently defeated” Islamic State, “or a son of ISIS,” without a long-term American presence, said James Jeffrey, who served as U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 2010 to 2012. “Even if they’re promised the moon, only if we have a presence will the Kurds and Sunnis buy into a Baghdad that’s dominated by the Shiites and indirectly by Iran.”

Jeffrey said that moves to establish a peacekeeping or monitoring force should be led by the U.N. but backed by U.S. military power. That means a modest American force should plan on remaining in Iraq and eventually in Syria once the Islamic State is defeated, he said.

More than 2,000 American troops are helping retrain the Iraqi military to fight back against the Islamic State on the ground, even as U.S. drones and jet fighters have carried out hundreds of airstrikes, yielding some earlysuccesses by halting the militant group’s advances.

A major ground offensive against the militant group won’t be launched for several months. But experts say that in order to avoid a repeat of the American withdrawal in 2011, which allowed Iran to become a dominant power, thus marginalizing Sunnis and leading to the birth of the Islamic State, it’s time to plan for what comes after the militant group is defeated or sufficiently contained. One option gaining currency is an international force that can keep the region’s Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites at peace and prevent the breakup of Iraq along ethnic and religious lines.

For starters, Obama may have to allow American troops a deeper role in fighting the Islamic State along with Kurdish Peshmerga forces and Sunni tribes, as well as giving both those groups “some guarantee that we’d be there for the long term,” said Jeffrey, now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Even if the Kurds and Sunni tribes fully commit to taking on the Islamic State, once the fight against the militants is over, “the Kurds and Sunnis will be open to the same temptation as before: Kurds would want to go independent and the Sunnis may make common cause with the next jihadi group,” Jeffrey said.

The United States has 2,140 troops in Iraq out of the 3,100 that Obama has authorized, according to Army Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman. The remainder of the troops will head to Iraq in the coming weeks.

About 800 of the troops are there to protect the American Embassy in Baghdad and other U.S. personnel, while the rest are training Iraqi military forces, Warren said. A group of 320 Marines are at al-Asad air base in Iraq’s Anbar province — a stronghold of the Islamic State — and are drawing almost daily fire from the militant group, Warren told reporters Jan. 5.

Many of the Sunni tribes the United States is trying to woo now to take on the Islamic State were once critical to the so-called Anbar Awakening that helped the United States defeat al Qaeda in Iraq back in 2006. The tribes later turned on the government of Iraq’s then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki — a Shiite — who refused to pay the fighters or fold them into the standing Iraqi military after the violence subsided, setting the stage for the emergence of the Islamic State.

While Iraq’s current prime minister, Haider al-Abadi — a Shiite with close ties to Iran — has, unlike his predecessor Maliki, publicly committed to running an inclusive government, in private meetings with officials he has voiced skepticism about trusting Sunni tribal leaders, according to U.S. and European officials.

Even if the militant group were defeated or just degraded, the impact of such an outcome will be limited “unless the U.S. can also work with the key factions in Iraq, and its allies, to create a stable structure for cooperation between Shiite Arab, Sunni Arab, and Kurds,” Anthony Cordesman, a national security scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an email. “It is far from clear that this is possible.”

But such political accommodation between the different groups is essential to prevent the “next millennial Islamist movement from gaining a new foothold,” Jeffrey wrote in an article published in late December on the Washington Institute’s website.

Although Iraq has allowed some autonomy to Kurds in the north, letting the country’s Sunnis enjoy similar freedoms in the Sunni Arab areas of the country “will require internal cultural change, international guarantees, and an outside monitoring force,” Jeffrey wrote.

U.S. military and State Department officials said there are currently no discussions about such a peacekeeping or monitoring force.

The Obama administration has said that as many as 60 countries are involved in the coalition against the Islamic State, including several Arab nations, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait.

Although Arab countries in the coalition see the predominantly Sunni Islamic State as a threat to their own well-being, they also “still deeply distrust the Shiite-dominated Iraqi Central Government and this tends to push it into the hands of Iran,” the Shiite power in the region, Cordesman said.

A U.N.-backed international peacekeeping force has precedent.

The international body has led such an effort in the past, with the U.N. Mission in Kosovo in 1999. The U.N. Security Council in June 1999 authorized NATO to station 50,000 troops after the end of the war to stop Serbian human rights violations and clashes between the Kosovo Liberation Army and Yugoslav forces. About 4,500 NATO troops from 30 countries currently remain in Kosovo to keep the peace.

Unlike in the Balkans in the late 1990s, the long-term presence of American troops in Iraq may produce its own backlash, said Nicholas Heras, a researcher at the Center for a New American Security.

A U.S. role “in such a peacekeeping force would likely be highly controversial, considering the baggage that the U.S. has in the Middle East region and the anger in the region toward the U.S. occupation of Iraq from the last decade,” Heras said.

Such a stabilizing force may make more sense in Syria, serving “as a guarantor of security in a post-Assad transitional period,” he said, referring to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. There, a multinational force could oversee the “disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of militias, and prevent the return of ISIS in eastern and northern Syria, once ISIS is removed from those areas of the country,” he said.

But the Obama administration’s policy toward Syria remains so incoherent that moderate rebel forces have been weakened and extremist ones have gained the upper hand. No credible peacekeeping force is likely to control the conflicting pressures, and there’s “no clear way that anyone can as yet predict whether, much less how, these various conflicts will end,” Cordesman said.